A few things.
I'm reading through Halo: Battleborn by Cassandra Rose Clark.
It's a good little novel so far and I think there's some takeaways in it for Halo as a franchise. The novel stars four highschoolers and a Spartan. First lesson, there is a bit that's very brilliant in the beginning, where one of the students is making a film with his friend: a Godzilla-esque monster movie with scale models. Their shooting the scene of the mechanical dragon model attacking the model town is paralleled with the Covenant attacking their actual town. This scene is very true to the spirit of Halo. In a lot of the old trailers there was stuff about kids, play, make believe, action figures, and so forth. In the Starry Night trailer, the two kids are lying in the grass talking about the mystery of space, and this is crosscut with the Chief. The trailer can be read two ways: both that the Chief, having been temporarily knocked unconscious during a battle was having memories of an experience as a child, and that the battle the Chief is experiencing is some make believe by the children. The Believe trailer has, well, an action figure diorama. The fictional context is that it's depicting a literal battle, but the meta-context is that Halo is a toy. It's at once a toy, a game, and that game is like a foundation, a jumping off point, for play, for make believe ... which is in many senses of the word "real", or at least a serious business. Read Homo Ludens.
Another takeaway from Battleborn is that it seems like certain characters family members, mothers, an AI named Salome, seem to be somewhat symbolic stand-ins for the author and 343i. This is very very good. Halo was incepted by Bungie, inhabited by fans for many years, it grew under the fans and Bungie's direction, and 343i has taken the mantle. This is a lot of responsibility. I think it's important to recognize that Halo is a shared psychic space between Bungie, 343i, and the fans.
A message to 343irosoft/theHaloteam/theHaloInfiniteteam/Mic
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My advice would be to treat Halo as a kind of dream-playground. Bungie no longer inhabits and is building it, but it's spirit remains and looms large. 343i now inhabits and controls the world of Halo, in the sense that it has the power to erect new permenant structures in the psychic-space, (and tear down or mess with old sandcastles via retconns and such) and the fans who are playing in the dream-that-is-Halo can be generally divided into two groups; fans of Bungie's Halo who are maybe a bit old and crusty but who have valuable insights into what Halo is (or was) at it's core (and are dissatisfied with 343i's intepretation of Halo), and fans of Halo as a gestalt, who might be new fans or longtime fans, but who are generally satisfied with the new Halo games. These four groups should be represented in the narrative. The Forerunners have the capacity to teleport in giant alien structures into the sides of mountains, so they could be a good fit to represent 343i. Maybe part of the story could be that the Forerunner network is under new management, from a faction within the Forerunner species. I'm just spitballing. Maybe this is sappy, but I get a mild sense from the people who are now running Halo that the whole project is being headed by mothers who want to keep their kids happy. That could be represented by an as-yet-unheard-of branch of the UNSC or ONI.
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Maybe there's an occult branch of ONI that knows a deep secret of the Halo universe; that secret is never explained to the player, but the occult sub-agency in ONI is made up of women who know the universe of Halo is a game. I'm just spitballing. Bungie could be represented as another Forerunner faction, or an old human-AI ... maybe Bungie could be represented by Cortana. The Bungie-era fans could be represented by grizzled marine bastards. The new fans, by green soldiers. I'm just spitballing, but symbolizing all of these concepts would make it easy to play with, and say something about, them; which is something I think it's important for 343i to do, seeing as you've taken the mantle of responsibility for this franchise. It's important to say your piece.
I've just watched the making of the E318 trailer video
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This is a good video, and it makes me optimistic about the future of Halo. The focus on symbolism I think was a good sign. Halo has always been deeply symbolic. It's in the title itself. One point that was made in the video is about getting over fear and restraint. A couple things I see that 343i has some timidity about tackling that are core to Bungie's Halo are religion and spirituality, and the Flood. No specific commentary is made regarding any specific religion, but you can compellingly argue that Halo was propaganda for the post 9/11 Iraq war era: that the Covenant was a vague demonization of Arabic peoples and of Islam, and the UNSC was a stand-in for the U.S. military. This is something that 343i should arguably address. Is this message relevant anymore? How should it change?
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As we move into a global society, what threat to humanity could, or should, the Covenant represent? I think Halo's iconography is still relevant, and like any good art it communicates multiple messages (so it is not only pro-military industrial complex propaganda) but a pivot should arguably be made in regards to the characterization of the Covenant. More on that later. The Flood were absent from the last two games, and they were replaced with a strange new enemy in the Prometheans. They never really clicked with me. Before I go any further, I'll say that Bungie's ways are a mystery to me, and I think it would be valuable to talk to Bungie's deep insiders about the mysteries of Halo. I am an outsider, interpreting from the outside ... but the Flood are deeply important to Halo. My hot-take is that they represent Consciousness of Pain, eternally, and agressively (wanting to spread that eternal pain), like the Cenobites from Hellraiser, or Patrick Bateman from American Psycho.
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Something that was stressed in that making of the E3 trailer video is that the trailer was meant to communicate hope. I would argue that the light shines brighter the deeper the darkness; a bit cliche'd and obvious, but I think Halo needs a strong villain, and it had that in the Flood, not the Covenant. The Covenant were a misdirection, and were somewhat redeemed in the course of the franchise (this is where Halo transcends being Iraq war propaganda; the Flood is a symbol for a universal threat, something that threatens both the United States of America, and her enemies ... something that threatens the world). The Halo rings somewhat represent the threat of nuclear annihilation. I'm sure you can see where this is going, the pieces are there, they just need you to put them together.
Now a rant about angels. I think they're directly relevant to the symbolism of Halo. I recently read a book that I would recommend to loremasters at 343i, called John Dee and the Empire of Angels: Enochian Magic and the Occult Roots of the Modern World, by Jason Louv. In it he explains how a magician in Queen Elizabeths court spent years talking to angels in a crystal ball. One interpretation of the events is that a type of wheat in England at the time was infected with a hallucinogenic mold; one explanation for the adventure. The truth is a bit more bizzare though. Read the book. Anyway, the Enochian angels should not be confused with traditional ideas about angels. Think of them as different beings entirely. So those two kids in the Starry Night Halo 3 trailer talk about wondering what's "out there" in space. We have positive ideas about a celestial hierarchy in our culture: a general notion that there exists a God and his angels, and that they rule over everything. This will require some retcon, but I would like to argue that the Covenant should represent the Enochian angels, the Forerunners should represent the "highest" angels, and the Flood should represent their God. The Forerunners should also be cross symbolized with the Engineers from Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. That's highly relevant: the Engineers created the Alien species to destroy humanity, and the Alien species ends up destroying the Engineers. So here's the deal with the Enochian angels, or my understanding of it. Imagine an angel shows up in your room one night. It's beautiful and terrifying and does stuff like manifest fires that don't burn and strikes down demons that appear with a sword, and so on. The angel tells you how to summon it to converse with it, so you can learn God's will.
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You summon the angel a few nights later, like it tells you, and it shows up, but this time, a higher angel shows up and smites the lower angel, explaining that it was an evil spirit trying to decieve you. The lower angel's appearance changes to that of an ugly demon and it scampers away in fear. This process repeats itself about forty times; each time you communicate with a being higher and higher up the celestial hierarchy, and each time, the lower being was revealed to be a demon the whole time. Finally the fortieth angel explains that it's time for you to meet God, and you find out that these "angel's" god is a terrible dragon, the dragon of myth, encircling space. The dragon eats you. That is, what I would argue, what Humanity should be up against in Halo. The dragon is the Flood, eternal concsciousness of pain, the Forerunners worship the Flood (like the Engineers seem to do in Alien: Covenant), and the Covenant are essentially a cabal of decieving celestial beings who worship the Forerunners.
Now here's the real twist; the Covenant are actually trying to protect humanity from knowledge (both in the literal and experiential sense) of the Flood (eternal consciousness of pain) but their method of protecting us is to kill us, to prevent us from becoming assimilated by the Flood. So, we're forced to defend ourselves from the celestial hierarchy, and the Gravemind which rules it.
This is all a bit of a paraphrase of John Dee and the Empire of Angels (which I would highly recommend to the teams working on Halo), mixed with my thoughts about Halo, but I hope it helps. A villain like this would make the UNSC, which in my view represents the positive aspect of the global culture we've created, and the Spartans, very clearly noble and a force for good.
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